Done alone, a night of drinking is considered sad, unhealthy, even pathetic. Pretty fun too, if you ask me, but I once had a therapist who told me otherwise. An adventure in the company of friends, on the other hand, promises shared experience, a way to fortify and express friendship. In either case, setting means a lot. Draining a few beers on a weekday evening at a dive three blocks from my house is a pleasant, if fairly pedestrian activity. I pair it with a game I want to watch, or someone I'd like to see. It's technically going out, but too close to home to feel very exciting. If I’m making a night of it, I prefer to leave my neighborhood and go somewhere far from the places I do laundry, buy groceries, and wait for buses, a setting where I won't see anyone I don't want to see, or suffer the irritating, familiar personalities populating the Mission on weekend nights. I also like going somewhere where good eats await in the early morning hours. When I can, I go to Chinatown.

I'm aware white people have been pursuing "exotic" vice on Grant St. for a century-and-a-half. I don't feel part of this tradition. At least, I’d hate to be some obnoxious urban explorer strolling jauntily down narrow stone streets, ducking red lanterns, hoping to catch a whiff of opium sliding out from under a door as I head to Li Po Lounge or Buddha Bar to sip the same drinks I can order anywhere else. I don't fantasize about gambling dens teeming with shady characters. I've read up on the salacious criminal history of the place and seen a few movies, but the allure has little to do with Chinatown's past, and a lot more to do with its present.

At around 7:30 on Friday night, I crossed the intersection of Grant and Bush, and walked up the hill, under the Dragon Gate. As I walked north, past a parade of seafood restaurants with their dedicated hawkers trumpeting specials outside and drab shops selling cheap baubles and katana blades, a procession of tourists headed in the other direction, back toward their Union Square hotels. Families with sulking teens dragging behind, elderly couples in hiking boots and bad hats -- they were finishing up their visits to the hallowed strip. They had snapped their pictures, scarfed their expensive dim sum lunches, and purchased a few curiosities to haul home. Dusk was settling down. They were exiting the premises, relinquishing it to the locals and anyone else coming through. It felt like a reverse commute. By 8:30, the streets were nearly empty, and I was at the Buddha Bar with a friend, my hand wrapped around an extremely cold bottle of Budweiser.

Save for us and the bartender, the bar was empty too. A few hours and several drinks later, other actors had entered the scene: a strange, lurching man with gigantic headphones covering his ears and an inability to stay upright on his stool for more than a few minutes, a tall, talkative blond lady, and a waitress in a red dress from the restaurant next door. The waitress was talking shit to the bartender, singing badly and loudly along with The Righteous Brothers emanating from the petrified jukebox.

You lost that lovin’ feeling
Whoa, that lovin’ feeling.

By 11 p.m., the blond lady was playing Liar's Dice with the bartender. If she lost, he said, she would remove some clothing. If he lost, she said, he'd pour ten free drinks. She won and passed the cherry-topped cocktails out like grocery store samples. The lurching man was gone. The waitress left and came back again. She knew the blond lady; they had cigarette after cigarette outside, cackling. The blond lady had just returned from Vegas, where she'd ditched a wealthy boyfriend only after running up a monstrous tab on their luxury suite. She was drowning out the wheezy jukebox chattering on about the boyfriend and others she'd had. The bar was her stage, the customers her captive audience.

At Buddha, the bathroom is down a flight of stairs, past stacks of empty boxes. The bartender dutifully buzzes open the lock for each costumer requiring relief, a task he repeats over a hundred times nightly. More people were streaming in now -- a weary, beach-scorched couple having a nightcap, a bunch of noisy bros who'd cabbed over from a Polk Street meat market -- and suddenly the skinny little bar packed with bodies. Every three seconds, the Liar's Dice cup slammed down on the bar and someone screamed in horror or joy above the din. The weird, jerky rhythmic pattern of buzzer and cup was coming at me in stereo---the former honking in one ear, the latter banging away in the other. An hour before closing, we moved onto the more spacious Li Po Lounge across the street, where the mixed drinks taste like rubbing alcohol and the booths in the back are covered in sleazy vinyl the color of fingernail paint. As we squeaked and slid around a table in the back, I flashed on a flickering memory of a night in 2003 when some friends visited from New York and danced from table-top to table-top, hopping like frogs. I wasn’t sure if the memory was real, but it was in my head all the same.

At 2:30 a.m., my friend and I finally had what we hadn’t realized we’d been waiting for: a hearty “dinfast,” that blurry, yet satisfying repast enjoyed between closing time and dawn by witless forgot-to-eat-before-I-drank party people and late-shift toilers alike. My friend had been to Yuet Lee (1300 Stockton at Broadway) on a few prior occasions. In spite of my eight years in the city and occasional forays into Chinatown, I was a newbie, making a discovery I probably should have soaked up half a decade earlier.

Yuet Lee has a Coca-Cola sign above the door. In what seemed like one minute, I went from leaning against a pole outside of Li Po to sitting on a chair at a brown Formica table inside a bright spare dining room, craning back my neck and twisting my head in order to see the specials board without my glasses. I opened the fat menu and gazed at the dish descriptions. The letters, numbers, and characters started to undulate across the pages. My friend reached over and quickly closed it. The specials were the thing, it seemed, and that was fine by me. At that point, anything hot and greasy was fine by me. In the center of the room, a table of uniformed cops bellied up to a spread of brown-sauced noodles on white plates. Several beleaguered couples in party attire languished in the corner, chewing on spareribs. The restaurant was really bright, seemingly brighter every second, as if the lights were being turned up as the clock ticked along. I suppose that is typical of late-night establishments. Harsh florescents keep the drunks from falling asleep.

Our food arrived almost immediately after we placed our order. A glistening, pale nest of rings, tentacles, and assorted indeterminable bits, the peppery fried squid had a lovely crunch. The lip-stinging saltiness was oddly refreshing after the evening’s liquid diet. I recall a heap of noodles less vividly. They were very thin and yellowish, coated in a dry sauce redolent of curry. Slices of barbecued pork poked out from the tangles, along with half-circles of soft onion. I could have eaten buckets of this, in part because sucking up the clumps of noodles required such little effort. Though tastier, the mango chicken was harder to finish. In my state, I had a hard time getting my grease-slicked chopsticks to hold on to each slippery chunk of mango. Eating at the breakneck speed my liquor-logged stomach demanded was impossible under the circumstances, and at times, the constant tumbling of food from stick to table or napkin-shrouded lap was so maddening I couldn’t focus on the flavors. After it fell for the third time, I picked one errant morsel right off the table with my fingers. Whenever I managed to get mango and chicken in the same bite though, the pay-off -- sweet, half-melted fruit and tender thigh meat -- made up for the ordeal.

Chinatown is both physically and psychologically distant from my usual digs, stuck in the center of the busiest part of the city, yet remote at the same time. It’s on a different time-table. Overrun by tourists during the day, Grant Street is comparatively serene at night, unlike my neighborhood, which, apart from folks taking photos of the murals along 24th St., draws larger crowds when the sun drops down. As a general rule, I prefer going in when most people are going out, and for that, there’s no place like Chinatown after 9 p.m. I’ll never head across town for a burrito, even if it’s amazing, because I live in the Mission, but I will take two forms of public transportation in order to drink a Budweiser -- the most ubiquitous of mediocre bar beers -- in the right place. That place’s proximity to salt-and-pepper squid ensures subsequent visits will end the same way -- with too many drinks and a few plates at 3 a.m.

Restaurants and bars with themes have always rubbed me the wrong way. I think of the first and only time I walked into Butter. It must have been 2003. While I was as well-versed in irony as any literary theory buff with a fresh diploma, the brown-bagged forties, snack stand carved out of the side of a trailer, and steaming tater tots seemed a bit much. I'm not a stickler for good taste, but I was instantly annoyed by a bar dedicated to aping the coarsest trappings of poor white culture for the amusement of privileged San Franciscans carousing through SoMa. I've seen it before around these parts: even politically radical non-profit workers who would rather poke out an eye than offend a person of color think nothing of throwing "white trash"-themed birthday parties for themselves. Plus, tater tots are actually really good -- without irony, just ketchup.

Still, I've splashed around the Tonga Room, stomped into the Bigfoot Lounge, and knocked back a whiskey at Bourbon and Branch, that classy throw-back to San Francisco's speakeasy-riddled past -- appealing themed joints, all of them. The other day, I was talking themed bars with some buddies, one of whom manages a newish decidedly un-themed establishment in Russian Hill, on Polk, just above the Tenderloin. The topic was Manhattan bars, where drink costs soar to airport prices -- $6 for a bottle of beer, $10 for a well drink. We joked that someone should start a really, really expensive bar in San Francisco called $$$. There would be a $50 cover charge, and no music, karaoke, free food, pool, or pub quiz to account for the steep entrance fee. The drinks would not be made with fancy infused potentially illegal spirits or feature small artisanal producers. They would be perfectly plain and perhaps a little weak. Still, if you could afford to buy your way in, you could hang out with others who could as well, which might be reward enough. It'd be pure elitism, distilled -- as appropriate a theme as any.

My trip to Japan late last March gave me a new perspective on themed drinking establishments. I wasn't there long enough to deliver an exhaustive report -- I'm sure some late-night Travel Channel special has already tried. There was so much I did not see, particularly in Tokyo, where I only spent a few jet-lagged days. My home-base for most of the visit was Kyoto, Japan's old Imperial capitol. Still, after a week of bouncing around that city's bars and informal late-night eateries, my head was throbbing -- and not from too much single malt. Along Kiyamachi St., very close to the Kamo River, tiny izakayas and watering holes burrow into unassuming commercial storefronts and stubby office buildings. You walk up a few flights of stairs -- as if going to see a disreputable dentist -- and knock on doors that open on to strange, insular, fastidiously detailed worlds. They reminded me of levels in Super Mario Brothers: through one portal, a swanky, pocket-sized cool jazz club draped in blue curtains appeared, through another, fittingly, a red-and-white toadstool-themed "mushroom" bar no bigger than an apartment kitchen -- both in the same building, occupying suites on the same floor.

One night, I visited two establishments thoroughly preoccupied with Jamaica's most prominent (and cliched) cultural and artistic exports -- Bob Marley, an easy way with marijuana, Rastafarianism, ripe for the watering down, and the flag's black, yellow, and green color scheme. Despite being a huge reggae fan, in the United States, I wouldn't have had the slightest interest. Nonetheless, Rasta and Rub-A-Dub were a lot of fun. The first is a dark cave on the 4th or 5th floor of an office building. Muzak renditions of Rockers classics seep from hidden speakers. A weed leaf mosaic rises up out of the tiled floor. A shrine to Mr. Marley occupies the middle of the back wall, bathed in chartreuse light, overlooking the scene. When I was there, the crowd was typically diverse: bartenders with desperate attempts at dreadlocks, a few business guys enjoying an extended happy hour, a party of ladies on the heels of a shopping trip, and a couple hanging out along the side wall, with the lanky American gentleman trying not to look as absurd as the retina-burning blue "island" cocktails in his glass. Significantly older, Rub-A-Dub is located in a frond-filled basement. According to legend, the owner, a Japanese man, married a Jamaican woman, and opened the bar to continuously remind her of her homeland. In truth, theme aside, Rasta would be considered a pretty good restaurant in San Francisco, offering roast fish heads and Japanese riffs on jerked chicken and seafood. I didn't eat at Rub-A-Dub (too many fish heads at Rasta), but I did have a few drinks under bunches of bananas hanging from the ceiling.

I returned from Japan in April -- just ten days after I'd arrived -- but I started thinking about themes all over again last week, when I read an S.F. Weekly blog post about Hogs & Rocks. Set to open in May or June, this joint endeavor of Maverick chef Scott Youkilis and Eric Rubin of Tres Agaves will serve 45 different kinds of ham, along with pickles, salads, and oysters (the rocks, of course). Unlike, say Rasta, Hogs & Rocks will do food and drink first, letting aesthetics follow suit. If the bar sprang up in Japan, the floor cushions would be swine-pink and sewn up to look like plump hind legs. There'd be small chairs shaped like oyster shells. Albums by Badfinger (lead singer, the late Peter Ham) would boom on the stereo. Images of piggy pop culture's most prominent representatives -- Wilbur, Porky, Pooh's nervous little friend, and a rogue's gallery of notorious male chauvinists -- would line the walls. The atmosphere would be unsubtly rendered, but genuine, irony-free -- seriously silly, with excellent food. That's one distinction I can draw between themed bars and restaurants here and there: seemingly goofy joints in Japan actually tend to have good food, whereas in the United States, even in San Francisco, corny trappings (from tiki bars to Chuck E. Cheese) all but guarantee an indifferent kitchen.

In Kyoto, the most unassuming bar I visited was in many ways the most revealing. To launch a long night of drinking, my girlfriend and I wandered into Color, an elegant, stylish lounge decked out in handsome modern furniture and classy vintage appliances. This was a nice place to drink. It reminded us of countless bars we'd patronized in the States. We discerned no theme, which, obviously, didn't surprise us. We'd seen plenty of regular bars around. This one just felt cozier than most. Then, we grabbed a card on the way out and read the finer print. The bar did in fact have a theme. It identified as "New York-style," which explained why it struck us as so familiar -- right down to the $10 cocktails.

Photo by Jen Maiser

Casual drinkers beware, cocktail nerds have a new way of ordering drinks in San Francisco. No longer satisfied with set menus or even with drink specials du soir, the true cocktailian now knows how to order custom-made drinks, and it's definitely the In thing to do.

Don't believe me? Next time you go to a bar, take a listen. There will probably be at least one or two patrons who, after sampling a few drinks on the bar menu, will leave their next drink up to the bartender. They'll probably give clues like, "I'd like something with Bluecoat gin and ginger" or "I'm looking for something with a bitter edge, but not Campari-bitter," and then sit back to wait for their custom drink.

It's akin to a diner swanning into a restaurant, disdaining the proffered menu, and instead waving a hand at the waiter, announcing, "Tell the chef to surprise me!" In that context, it sounds imperious, arrogant, and more than a bit conceited to assume the chef has nothing better to do than to whip up some special, off-menu delicacy. However, just like a sommelier ferreting out the best wines to pair with dishes, I've noticed that some bartenders in the Bay Area seize upon this request from their drinkers as a challenge.

Not only that, but when the drinker can talk at length about their specific preferences -- often displaying an informed knowledge of liquors, liqueurs, and mixology in general -- the bartender realizes, "Hey, this isn't just another cosmojitini swiller, who doesn't care what I make as long as it was pimped on Lipstick Mafia and goes down easy." The bartender seems to like the fact that the drinker is not just drinking, but thinking. That, in recognition of the bartender's prowess, the drinker is putting as much care into their ordering as the bartender puts into his or her shaking and straining.

Now, I'm not saying that you should charge into a bar, heedless of the crowds that might be there, and demand your made-to-order drink. I'm saying, take some time to learn the menu, get a rapport going with the bartender, and if he or she is not overwhelmed with orders and customers, make your move. But you can't just say, "Surprise me!" and expect magic to swirl into your glass. No, you have to do your part as well. Explain the things you like and don't like. Show some respect for the menu and the bar.